Enrollment at state School for the Deaf has dwindled, but services are still vital for some

"Set it up, count it out," second-grade teacher Nancy Wilson told her class during a recent math lesson on numbers that are greater than, less than or equal to one another.

"Which is less, seven or nine?" Wilson asked the class.

All her students eagerly raised their hands and one girl responded "seven" after Wilson called on her.

"That’s correct, so which number is less, 37 or 39?" she probed.

Another student approached the smart board at the front of the classroom and traced a circle around 37, the correct answer, earning a high-five from her teacher.

The tutorial was a success, but because the three students in Wilson’s tiny class are all deaf or hard of hearing, the lesson wasn’t audible to a visitor. Wilson and her students at the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf communicated using American Sign Language.

These students are among a group of roughly 150 from across the state who attend New Jersey’s century-old, state-run school for the deaf, which is located in Ewing on a sprawling 110-acre campus.

Fifty years ago, when a nationwide rubella epidemic left hundreds of New Jersey children deaf, the school bustled with as many as 800 students. Today, enrollment is a fraction of that size, and to survive, the school will need to downsize to match its smaller student body, according to a state audit released last month.

"A change in location should be considered," State Auditor Stephen Eells wrote in the report on the school’s finances.

The Katzenbach school’s student population may be shrinking, but Superintendent Angel Ramos said the services provided are just as vital now as they were in the 1960s.

"At a regular public school, you’re not just a student, you’re a deaf person who can’t communicate with anyone and can’t be independent," said Ramos, who is deaf. "Here, you’re free to express your personality and your opinion. You’re free to be yourself."

Using sign language to convey their questions in class, students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade at the Katzenbach school learn the same curriculum and take the same standardized tests required of public school students across the state. High school students play interscholastic sports, and younger students go on field trips.

Senior Ryan Smith attended a regular public school in Trenton before enrolling at Katzenbach.

The eager student had an interpreter, but Smith said he missed a lot of content in class because he couldn’t understand what his teacher was saying. When he asked for clarification, Smith, who is hard of hearing, said his teacher would get frustrated or mock his disability.

Worst of all, not being able to follow the lesson made him anxious and jittery, said Smith, a senior.

"After class, my aide would try to recap the lesson, but it’s not the same as hearing it from the teacher," he said. "Teaching is the teacher’s job."

Home districts pay Katzenbach an annual tuition of $45,000 to enroll students like Smith there. The figure is triple the state’s average per-pupil cost and funds salaries of dozens of aides and therapists who give students at the school one-on-one attention.

For example, a recent lesson on a children’s book for eight deaf students with multiple disabilities required help from eight aides.

Parents of deaf children often struggle to decide where to enroll them for school, said Janet DesGeorges, executive director of a national deaf education advocacy group called Hands and Voices. Some students do best in a contained environment like the Katzenbach school, while others thrive in general education classes with extra support, she said.

"Our motto is whatever works for the child is the right choice," DesGeorges said.
The right choice, however, can be difficult to determine.

Competing bodies of scholarly research argue that deaf children are better off in their neighborhood schools and that deaf students excel socially and academically only when they’re surrounded by deaf peers who use sign language to communicate.

Among the 1,500 students with hearing impairments in New Jersey public schools, the vast majority are enrolled in general education classes with extra support services, state data shows. This pattern holds true across the country, too, where dozens of state-run schools for the deaf have closed in recent years.

Many of the students enrolled in neighborhood schools are hard of hearing or have had cochlear implants surgically embedded in their ears. The revolutionary implants have helped thousands of deaf children hear sounds for the first time, but sometimes kids struggle to understand what the sounds mean and still use sign language to communicate.

Federal laws require that disabled children receive free, appropriate public education in the "least restrictive environment," but for deaf students at the Katzenbach school, the least restrictive environment happens to be one where they’re segregated from peers who can hear normally.

During a recent language composition class at Katzenbach, middle school students learned about sentence construction using visual aids called manipulative visual language blocks. Each block represents a type of word, and the blocks’ arrangement gives students clues about how to form a proper sentence.

For example, one exercise called for students to write a sentence with the following components: an article, a noun, a verb, a preposition, an article and a noun. One boy scribbled the sentence "The book is under the chair" on a small white board. Another student wrote "The boy is in the house."

The 13- and 14-year-old boys in Bilik’s class agreed the Katzenbach school was "way cooler" than the public schools they would have attended in New Brunswick, Pennsauken and Trenton because they’re surrounded by friends who understand them. Three of the students board on the school grounds during the week.

"Coming here helps me be better with my sentences," said Corey Jenkins, 13, using sign language to express himself. "If I practice a lot, I’m going to become an even better writer and reader."

Ensuring the school’s survival is paramount to Ramos, who previously operated state-run schools for the deaf in Idaho and Arizona. Students like Corey, he said, will always need a place to go where they feel like they belong, he added.

"We don’t have gangs here, we have very little bullying and because we’re so small, students get one-on-one attention," Ramos said. "Yes, we’re a school, but really, we’re more like a family."